The Good Mothers

by Alex Perry

  Despite their differences, Giuseppina and Concetta had been close friends since they were girls. When they were growing up in Rosarno in the 1980s, the town had been a cold, hard place of loveless lives where girls could be beaten just for stepping out of the house unaccompanied. Rosarno was also small, however, and as schoolgirls Giuseppina and Concetta would see each other every day in the playground or the street. As they approached their teens, their lives also followed an identical prescribed course, which – since the town had no secondary school and ’Ndrangheta girls weren’t allowed to leave it – meant marriage quickly followed by motherhood.

  Giuseppina finished her education at thirteen. By then, she had already met her future husband, Rocco Palaia, twenty, whose father managed weapons for the Pesce clan. At fourteen, Giuseppina eloped with Rocco, a common event in Rosarno, known as fuitina. At fifteen she gave birth to the first of the couple’s three children, Angela. By then, Rocco was doing little more than smoking weed and lying around the house all day, so Giuseppina went to work in the family store. It wasn’t long before Rocco was arrested and jailed for mafia association.

  Concetta had always had it harder than her friend. When she was eleven, her brother Giuseppe caught her playing in the street with a few local boys. He beat her, dragged her home by her hair and forbade her to leave the house alone again. After that, Concetta never went out for pizza or gelato. ‘You know my brother ’Peppe,’ she would say. ‘If he saw me, you know he’d kill me.’ When Concetta was thirteen, she met her twenty-one-year-old future husband, Salvatore Figliuzzi, and eloped with him. When she was just fifteen, Concetta gave birth to Alfonso, the first of the couple’s three children. Salvatore was also soon hauled off to jail.

  By the time of his arrest, Salvatore was already beating Concetta regularly. One day he held a gun to her head. When Concetta complained to her father, he replied, ‘It’s your marriage and your life. You deal with it.’ Concetta might have expected things to improve with Salvatore in jail. Instead, her father took over the role of violent disciplinarian, slapping her to the ground in the street one day when she returned late from a shopping trip to Reggio. Meanwhile, on conjugal visits to prison, Concetta conceived a second child, Tania, then a third, Rosalba, whom she named after her mother.

  By their early twenties, Giuseppina and Concetta were alone, married to jailbird husbands and mothers to three children each. They would meet at the school gates or the doctor’s or in the Pesce family mini-mart where Giuseppina worked, across the street from the Cacciola family home. The two women negotiated their situations as best they could. Concetta had somehow remained ‘a sunny girl’, said Giuseppina years later, through tears. ‘Strong. She was an optimist … She cared so much.’ As Lea had done growing up in Pagliarelle, Concetta sustained herself with a dream of true love that would take her away from it all. With Salvatore in jail, she began fantasising that she was not the abused wife of a violent small-time gangster at all but, rather, a woman tragically separated from her love. On prison visits, she would wear scarlet lipstick with thick eyeshadow and frame her face with thick long curls. She wrote Salvatore wistful letters. ‘I go out in the morning to take the children to school but I have no contact with anyone,’ she wrote in 2007. ‘How can I live if I cannot even breathe? If I can’t even speak to anyone? My father likes to see me miserable from dawn to dusk. If only I could have a little peace of mind. I’d pay anything, take anything, for a little peace. I don’t know how long I can go on without you.’

  If Concetta survived by retreating into fantasy, Giuseppina endured through sheer will. Like Concetta, she was beaten by her husband. But Rocco would hit Giuseppina not because she was out on her own or because she was looking at other men, or even just because he could, but because Giuseppina insisted on speaking out of turn. ‘He beat me when I said what I thought,’ she said. ‘He attacked me to get me to shut up.’

  After Rocco went to jail, Giuseppina’s father, Salvatore, told her to confine herself to the home like Concetta. He refused to let her go to college or divorce Rocco or continue her piano lessons. ‘You’re not going anywhere,’ he shouted. ‘You’ll stay locked up in the house.’ Giuseppina’s way of conserving some autonomy was to join the family firm. Within a few years, she was running messages between bosses in jail, laundering money and overseeing the collection of pizzo. No one had to tell her what to do, she said later. ‘I lived in this family. I breathed these things, the superiority and the power and the privilege. I knew because I was there. I have always known, since I was a child’

  With every year that passed, Giuseppina’s knowledge of the ’Ndrangheta grew. She knew its power structure intimately. The nominal head of the clan was Giuseppina’s uncle Antonino. Since he was in jail, however, others handled day-to-day operations. By primogeniture, Giuseppina’s father, Salvatore, should have been the first choice to replace Antonino. But Salvatore had never been leadership material: since he was a boy, his nickname had been ‘u babbu’, the buffoon. The mantle instead fell to Antonino’s son and Giuseppina’s cousin, Francesco ‘Ciccio’ Pesce, a hothead given to angry and violent outbursts who wielded absolute power in his father’s stead.

  The ’Ndrangheta was run as an autocracy. But Giuseppina would later insist it was one willingly accepted by its subjects. In the ’Ndrangheta, tyranny was what passed for effective leadership, and what it took to have and hold power. At its heart, however, Giuseppina said an ’ndrina was a collective. ‘They decided together, as a family, who took state contracts, who handled extortion, who oversaw the drug trade. That’s the strength of the clan – that we are all family members together.’

  Inside the ’ndrina, picciotti like Giuseppina were expected to help out however they were needed. Her work gave Giuseppina a comprehensive view of the Pesce empire. The house of her seventy-eight-year-old grandmother, Giuseppa Bonarrigo, often served as a base for operations and a meeting place. There the family would discuss at length the delicate question of how much pizzo to charge. The younger men tended to squeeze as much as they could out of everyone, once even extorting tickets for the entire family from a visiting circus. The older men would warn against overdoing it, arguing that driving a business to ruin was in no one’s interest. Another point of discussion was how to divide the take. Giuseppina saw many picciotti try to resist handing over their revenues to a common family pot, as required. What everyone agreed, however, was that there could be no exceptions to paying pizzo. ‘An outsider can’t say no because he is afraid,’ said Giuseppina. The men would go and ask for money like they were doing people a favour. But everyone knew they couldn’t refuse.’

  Giuseppina got to know other sides of the business. Her father, Salvatore, her cousin Ciccio and her husband Rocco all moved cocaine through Gioia Tauro port and stashed packages in the house, ready for onward transport. Negotiating the interminable roadworks on the A3 from Reggio Calabria to Salerno one day, her brother pointed out which sites belonged to the Pesces and which to other clans. ’Ndrangheta rules also required each clan to have a stash of automatic rifles and pistols. Rocco and his brother had buried the Pesce arsenal around town, wrapping the guns in sheets of plastic and duct tape. ‘We’re prepared for a war,’ Rocco liked to say.

  It was the Pesces’ firepower that guaranteed the family was feared or, as they liked to see it, respected. Around town, people would make way for Giuseppina. In restaurants, bills never appeared. In grocery stores, the manager would come out to serve her personally. If she went to the doctor’s, she walked straight to the head of the queue and ‘no one could ever say anything to me because I was part of the family’. One time she went to an ear specialist in Gioia Tauro. On hearing her name, the man asked after the health of her niece and her daughter, then knocked his price down to bargain-basement level, saying he wanted to send ‘his greetings to my uncle and my family’.

  But if the family enjoyed their local fame, other kinds of attention made them paranoid. The ability of the police and the carabinieri to
listen in was unreal. They tapped phone calls, filmed the interiors of houses from several kilometres away, mounted secret cameras outside homes and schools and planted bugs almost anywhere – in cars, walls and fireplaces, in orchards and schools, even under stones in Giuseppina’s grandmother’s garden. The Pesces bought bug detectors to sniff out these devices, as well as jammers to block their signal and scanners of their own to monitor the carabinieri’s radios. Still, they were often reduced to whispering and using sign language in their own homes. Ciccio was always telling the others, ‘Don’t talk too much.’ More than once, his paranoia led him to smash up his phone and television, unscrew every lightbulb in his house and throw everything into the street.

  This mistrust forced many a boss into hiding. Most sought sanctuary in secret underground bunkers buried deep in the countryside. It wasn’t as bad as it sounded. The bosses would kit out their bunkers with lights, televisions, kitchens and comfortable beds. Some had their hideouts built into the cliffs to give them a sea view and a sunset. Others enjoyed bucolic locations in orchards or olive groves. Instinctively territorial, however, the Pesces built their bunkers in town, often under their own houses. Before he was arrested in 2005, Giuseppina’s father had been hiding for years in a bunker that he’d spent thousands of euros renovating under the floor of Giuseppina’s grandmother’s house.

  If respect was everything to the Pesces, shame was unacceptable for the same reason. The treacherous and unfaithful didn’t just need to be killed. They had to vanish from the face of the earth and leave no reminders of the dishonour they had brought on the family.

  By 2010, Michele Prestipino was looking into a number of deaths in Calabria, including some officially recorded as suicides, that he suspected were actually honour killings. In one of the most recent, a widow called Dominica Legato had jumped to her death from her balcony in Rosarno in 2007. At least, that was what her son told police. Giuseppina, Concetta and every woman in Rosarno suspected another version of events, as did the coroner, who found knife wounds on Dominica’s hands, suggesting she had been fending off an attack when she fell. A few months later the Rosarno man with whom Dominica was said to be having a relationship also disappeared.

  The full fury of the Rosarno ’Ndrangheta’s rage could be terrifying. What made it even more disturbing was how the ’Ndrangheta could sustain it. In 1979, when she was twenty-five, the husband of Concetta Teresa Galluci, a mason, died in an accident, falling from the fourth floor of a building he was helping build for the Pesces. Concetta and her husband had had three children. More than a decade later, she began a relationship with twenty-three-year-old Francesco Alcuri. One night in November 1993 in Rosarno, Alcuri was shot nine times in the groin, dying eleven days later in agony. Concetta, now forty, fled for Genoa in northern Italy, where her sister lived. One evening four months after arriving, she opened her sister’s front door and was shot in the head. The gunmen then shot the dead woman’s seventy-two-year-old mother as she ran into the living room in her nightdress, before killing her twenty-two-year-old niece while she slept in her bed.

  The Pesces were deeply secretive about their own family embarrassments. Not for them the scrutiny that accompanied the discovery of a dead body. Long ago, the Pesces had calculated that since Rosarno’s graveyard was the most obvious place to dump a body, it would be the last place anyone would look. Up there, buried under the floor in the family’s chapel, was Giuseppina’s grandfather, Angelo Ferraro, killed for having an affair. Alongside him was Annunziata Pesce, Giuseppina’s cousin, who had betrayed her husband and the entire ’Ndrangheta by running off with a policeman. Kidnapped off the street in broad daylight in 1981, she was shot in the neck by the boss, Antonino Pesce, while her elder brother Antonio watched. Antonio’s reward for his unflinching loyalty? Promotion to a dominant position inside the ’ndrina for him and his immediate family.

  Killings like these left no doubt about the price of betrayal. It was a measure of the desperation of many ’Ndrangheta women that the men kept finding it necessary to carry them out. Perhaps it was inevitable. ’Ndrangheta mothers knew their sons would grow up to be killers and drug dealers destined for prison and an early grave. They knew their daughters would be married off as they had been, barely pubescent, to an older, abusive, criminal husband. They expected to lose their own abusive, criminal husband to death or jail. Faced with a life in which what Concetta called Rosarno’s ‘stone-hearted men’ extinguished all the light and joy in the world, it was hardly surprising that the town’s women grabbed what little sweetness they could.

  Many of the men seemed to understand this. Their response was not to ease off but to take pre-emptive action, particularly when, with a husband dead or in jail, an ’Ndrangheta wife found herself alone. Concetta’s cousin Giuseppina Multari had been locked up at home as a virtual slave since the day in 2005 that the Cacciola men had killed her husband, their cousin, for being a junkie. When her brother tried to confront the Cacciolas about the way they were treating his sister, he also vanished.

  When Concetta’s husband, Salvatore, went to jail, her father and brother resolved to prevent her from almost ever leaving the house. But such blinkered conservatism blinded them to the fact that they were living in the twenty-first century, in which friendship – or more – was only ever a click away. ‘In the land of the ’Ndrangheta, the internet is an open window to a closed world,’ said Alessandra. ‘It introduces women to a free world. It tends to provoke a kind of emotional explosion.’

  So it proved with Concetta. ‘She began to explore the world through the web,’ said Giuseppe Creazzo, a prosecutor in Palmi who would later investigate the Cacciola family. Concetta found she liked celebrity news: charming people leading beautiful lives. She imagined the famous couples watching sunsets together and going out at night. Soon, said Creazzo, she was looking for friends for herself. She joined Facebook. And slowly, a feeling began to grow inside her. ‘Every day,’ said Creazzo, ‘Concetta felt more and more like rebelling.’

  By the middle of 2009, Concetta was chatting regularly to a Rosarno man who had moved to Germany. Giuseppina, more assertive, went further than her friend, beginning a clandestine affair with a man called Domenico Costantino with whom she had worked at a family factory that made crystallised fruit. ‘He was the first man who ever seemed to care for my children,’ said Giuseppina. ‘He was the first man to respect me as a woman, the first who ever loved me.’

  Almost anywhere else in Europe, either of these liaisons would have merited condemnation or, perhaps, understanding. In Rosarno, Concetta and Giuseppina were risking death. It was a gauge of the lovelessness in their lives that both women courted that danger without hesitation.

  X

  In Pagliarelle, the carabinieri were watching another illicit romance unfold.1

  For Denise, a birthday without Lea had been followed by Christmas without Lea, then New Year without Lea, all of them spent in Lea’s apartment, upstairs from Lea’s mother. One night, a friend’s family took Denise to a restaurant on the coast for dinner – but someone had brought Christmas presents from Milan. Another time, when Carlo took his daughter to the dentist, Denise let herself imagine that it would be the most natural thing in the world for a daughter to ask her father if he had any news of her missing mother. Carlo snapped that Denise needed to get it through her head that her mother had left them. He knew nothing about where she was or what she was doing.

  Denise already had a difficult relationship with food. Now she took to binge eating to relieve the stress, gaining twenty kilos in months. If Carlo noticed, he didn’t seem concerned. Denise’s Aunt Marisa took her niece to a clinic but when that proved ineffective, she also offered Denise little other help.

  Desperate, Denise turned to the man her father had deputed to keep an eye on her in Pagliarelle. Carlo had given thirty-one-year-old Carmine Venturino orders to escort Denise wherever she went and, above all, to keep her away from the authorities. Carmine would drive Denise around all day. He g
ave her pocket money. He worked with her in the Cosco family pizzeria in Petilia. When Denise started at a new high school in January, it was Carmine who helped settle her in. Watching all this, the surveillance teams began to feel uneasy. The officers knew Carlo had told Carmine to watch Denise. But this looked like something else.

  What made the officers particularly uncomfortable was what they were learning about Carmine’s movements on the night Lea vanished. Phone records showed that Carmine spoke to Carlo dozens of times in the hours after Lea disappeared and in the days that followed. Carmine said little of substance in his calls. But his tone had been panicky and his movements erratic. His GPS showed him driving outside the city several times in the days and nights after 24 November. Recordings of his voice showed he’d been desperate to find the keys to a warehouse and that, once he located them, he kept going back to the place. Besides, thought the officers, Carmine was Carlo’s sometime flatmate and one of his key lieutenants. He had to be involved.

  On 3 February, the carabinieri in Campobasso announced they had enough evidence to arrest Carlo for ordering the attack on Lea in her apartment in May 2009. They detained Carlo just as Denise returned from school. Watching her father being led away in handcuffs, Denise recognised the look on his face as the same he’d had on the night Lea went missing. A newspaper report about Carlo’s arrest the next day was accompanied by a picture of another man charged with the Campobasso attack, Massimo Sabatino. The paper said Sabatino was an associate of her father’s and was already in prison on a drug charge.

  Two months in, the officers investigating Lea’s disappearance could be pleased with their progress. They had a prime suspect, for whom they had established motive and opportunity, and from Lea’s case files, they had ample documentation to back up their allegations. Handily, Carlo was now also under arrest for another attack on Lea. But the murder case against Carlo also had a giant flaw: no body. Without it, a prosecutor couldn’t even say for sure that Lea had died, let alone how.